Identification of potential priority conservation areas for biodiversity in the Northwest Pacific Ocean based on habitat mapping
Huang Hao, Lei Cai, Danyun Ou
1 Third Institute of Oceanography, Ministry of Natural Resources
Due to human activities and global change, the earth's ecological system is continue deteriorating. To protect the oceans, The IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature) World Conservation Congress called for the full protection of 30% of each marine habitat globally and at least 30% of all the ocean. Thus, we quantitatively and qualitatively determine the number and distribution of priority areas based on species, seafloor topography, biological connectivity, and benthic regions factors. This article used the international seabed areas of the Northwest Pacific Ocean as the study area, and potential priority conservation areas for biodiversity are identified based on habitat mapping as follows(a) cold-water coral habitat distribution and Marine mammal occurrence probability were simulated based on cold-water coral observation data and Marine mammal occurrence data, (b) four physical variables -- water depth, slope, rugosity and bathymetric Position index (BPI) simulate seabed topography, (c) marine mammal occurrence data, POC, and ocean currents for connectivity prediction, (d) benthic species clustered to distinguish the marine biological regions.
The results show that priority conservation areas cover 29% of the total area, basically meeting the goal of protecting 30% of the world's Marine habitat. And there are four biogeographic regions for benthic organisms in the study area. If we take into consideration of the seabed mining area and reservation area designated by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the priority area will evenly distributed, and several priority areas in the south will cover small area and are fragmented, which mainly concentrated in cold-water coral prediction habitat.
Keywords：Priority conservation areas, Habitat mapping, Biogeographical regions
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